Chapter 6 b Photokinesis

Emi cringed and looked over at him crossly. Her shoulders hunched forward. “Why would he do that? I mean, it should be an intimate thing, right?”

He lifted his eyebrows and nodded his head. “Oh yes,” he agreed, “very intimate. What is most accepted in our culture is sharing to be done between a pair of lifelong partners only. That way they won’t be alone, and it will be in their best interests to protect one another. But Nansen, he never really liked the idea. He doesn’t care for the same kind of balance as most of us do. He’s selfish. When he takes, he has more people who will protect him and love him.”

Iggy peered up at the car ceiling, thinking about the thousands of faces he had seen Nansen with. If he had taken a little something from each of them, then he practically had an army waiting at his command.

“The negative,” Baine added, “is that he takes their urges away within their blood, which increases his own. Love is a very hard thing to contain, so he’s tried his hardest to compensate through parenting Iggy in a very human way. It helps the maniac keep himself distracted.”

“That’s one strange coping method,” Emi snickered.

“So, why didn’t you let him do it?” Iggy asked straight forward. “Why didn’t you let him do what you did to me? He said that he wanted to do it. He didn’t seem too sick… but you told him that he was.” He leaned forward through the gap in between the seats and peered into the side of Baine’s face. Baine returned his glance. His emerald green eyes were the last things Iggy saw with his blindness. A chill ran up along his arms and spine, and a swell of nausea passed through him. Maybe, it was still too soon to intentionally revisit the memory. He looked over at the passing forest and felt dizzy. “Uhhh…” he groaned, “so, this is motion sickness.”

Baine turned his head back and looked back at Iggy without the aid of mirrors. “I never thought we would do it on our own,” he claimed, then he turned back around to watch the road. “I always thought that our father would be the one to do it. But, after what happened, I felt a responsibility to do it myself. So, I made the decision alone.” He swallowed and sighed. “I’d rather it be me to go down for all of this mess than Nansen. By the way, he had offered himself to you, didn’t he? Maybe, if you take a little, it will help him.”

Iggy folded his arms across his chest and whispered, “he’s my brother.”

“All the better,” Baine interrupted. “I’ll be honest. I’ve shared myself a few times. Our blood is, to say the least, potent. I couldn’t resist the urge to share it for long. But Nansen? He’s the strong one of us. Once he finds out how much it hurts, though, he’ll probably be well off. Then he’ll stop fussing around about it, like a pansy.”

They pulled up to another tall brick wall with a thick metal gate. Baine activated the same button and the gate cranked open. The car drove through and they entered the village. Nice and slow.

It was a completely different world. There were clusters of shabby homes alight with flickering oil lamps. Water spouts with wet empty buckets stacked up against the walls. Quiet chicken coops. Wide trails rampant with bare footprints. Iggy opened his window and stuck his head out into the wind. Over the pungent smell of manure in the gardens, he noticed something more significant. He smelled the root vegetables that he had eaten nearly every day of his life- potatoes, carrots and beets. The smell was not delicious or appetizing, but rather rancid, however the same, and he recognized it like he would to a face. He understood the pungent displeasure as it filled his nasal cavity like fur and lingered there, contaminating his senses. He couldn’t blame Baine and Nansen for cooking so horribly. Regardless of the ingredients, it would always be awful.

The car crept to a halt in front of yet another wall. This wall was different. It was structured from the bones of boulders and was held together with concrete. It was larger, thicker, and more intimidating than the other two walls before it.

The dashboard lights turned off and Baine opened his door and got out. Iggy rushed to follow, but as he turned to his own door and clasped the handle, he peered down at his hand, and for a split moment he thought that his hand had disappeared. He wiggled his fingers and couldn’t see the movement, yet he could feel the armrest under his palm. He blamed the stress, shook his head, and opened the door.

The air was humid and even warmer now that they had stopped. Iggy could smell the dirt under his feet, the chicken dust floating in the wind, and the fresh leaves of rosemary all around. In person, unmoving, his surroundings were soaking into him with a limitless amount of possibility. A smile stretched so far across his face that it nearly hurt.

Emi came out and stood right next to him. She was too light for this night. Surely, too light. The glow came from her skin and hair and went even as far down as her feet. She had no shadow. She only had the soft reflection of light under her. As she walked forward, following Baine to the ladder standing against the outer wall, the light moved with her.

Iggy stroked his chin, blinked, then ran to catch up with her.

At the top of the ladder, Amare stood with his hand pressed over his heart to greet Baine formally. He was geared head to toe in his black uniform and strapped with one of the three assault rifles available to the community.

“Sir, I received your message,” he confirmed. Baine stepped around him and watched over the ledge at Emi and Iggy climbing up behind him. “House 55 has an old man, 82 years old, whose prognosis is very poor, and house 61 has an old woman, 90 years old, whose family cannot care for her any longer. Here-” he slipped a small folded piece of paper into Baine’s hand.

Baine glanced down at it and crumpled it into his pocket. “Is that it? I need at least three people to make this right.”

Amare’s expression didn’t falter, even when he glanced down at Iggy. “I sure hope he’s worth the hassle,” he commented. “He stole feed. I assume he has a punishment in store, just like anyone else who has ever stolen more than their share?”

Baine stared back at Amare in shock. “How dare you make such a comment?”

Iggy and Emi crawled over the top ledge, and as they came over, they could feel the tension between the two. “Hi, Amare,” Emi smiled, attempting to cut through it.

Iggy opened his mouth to greet him, too, but Amare glanced at him with a wrinkled face, rich with disgust, and he turned his cheek and looked straight at Baine expectantly. Now, Iggy didn’t know what to think of the rejection, but Baine did.

Wordlessly, Baine turned his back and headed to the watchtower ladder. Emi and Iggy raced behind him, side by side like two little puppies, easily lost and hard to entertain for long. Emi was first to venture up and Iggy followed closely behind her. While climbing, he peered back down. The ladders reached such great, dangerous heights, and he found his fingers itching to let go. Not to just let go, but to accidentally slip, or perhaps fall head first? He chuckled to himself under his breath. He wasn’t even sure if the fall would kill him now anyways, yet somehow imagining it tickled his ego.

At the top of the ladder there was a round room domed and lined with open windows. It was harder to breath and much windier than down on the ground. All of the scents were washed away by a musty mold smell coming from the tower walls. Scoping through the nearest window, Iggy watched Amare resume his watch over the dark green forest on the outer side of the wall.

From there, he finally saw that the size of their land, New Eden, was huge. The massive outer wall ran long past where the eyes could see and rounded back into itself in a huge circle. The village houses were large in numbers, filling miles worth of land in between the two walls. That strip of land surrounded the whole inner forest, which was a buffer between the two worlds. He spotted the vague light shining from their home in the very center, but he couldn’t see the actual house or the walls. Only the faint light emanating from the front gate.